Page 73 of Odder Still
‘Well, it’s your fucking fault?’It uses Lilias’s words from at her apartment, but in a far more teasing tone.
Shut up, I grumble, but there’s no bitterness now. Before I can scare myself out of it, I let the thought form:What would you do with me if you did latch?
It responds with a series of flashes: its disdain for my extra guzzles of whiskey, its fighting with me over my rolled-up sleeves, its nagging for me to eat, to breathe, to care more fully. It would not take me over or destroy me the way I had assumed, but every little emotion it would meld into me, every choice it would take, every piece of me it would slowly turn into something new—that would result in a decimated me all the same.
I can’t.
It doesn’t fight me, gently settling at my metaphorical feet instead.
With a sigh, I let it crack the bar’s lock, releasing a little more of myself in the process. We cross the dining area and slip around the bar. I lean hesitantly into the storeroom. Light spills down the stairway to the apartment. I cup my hands around my mouth to call out, already feeling like an intruder, but the conversation from the apartment stops me dead as the familiar, fiery voice solidifies in my mind.
Lilias. This close, I can just make out her words. “If they find him, they’ll have one more weapon against us.”
“With Malloch dead how can we know that any of this is accurate?”
“I trust my informants,” Lilias snaps.
Someone else backs her up. “Even the chance of it is bad enough!”
“We should act now. We have the Glenrigg ignit. The longer we hold on to that, the more danger we’re in.”
A much closer voice makes me jump.
“Breaking and entering’s still a crime in the lower districts, laddie.” Ivor Reid stands behind me, a parcel under one arm. His smile sharpens.
“It’s a shame to see your famous bar so dim and lonely.” I try to make my voice light, but the edge still comes through. We can both hear the conversation upstairs. We both know that we both know.
“It’s my brother’s birthday.” Ivor’s expression doesn’t change, but he seems to turn from flesh to stone all the same. “Seemed right to do something a little different today. Avenge him, maybe. He’s dead, you ken, a martyr for the last revolution—sixteen years old and the upper executed him in the square with our mother watching.”
I taste metal in the back of my mouth. “You’re helping Lilias Erskine.” In my revulsion, the words slip free, my mind still wheeling to make sense of them. “For what? What could you possibly be getting out of her schemes?”
“Me?” His shakes head, his upper lip lifting at the edges. “I’m doing this for Mara, not for myself. We’re gonna split the monopolies, shut down the gates, install a proper governing system where people from the entire city—the entire coast—have a say, and help the new government redistribute enough wealth throughout all levels of Maraheem that no one goes hungry or homeless or lacks medicine or a proper education.”
They’re good goals, honest ones, the kind I’d expect from a man like Ivor. But he’s brought Lilias into them, and she’s a taint even on the best of objectives. “You think aligning with her will do that—any of that?” The laugh that leaves me is maniacal, but I can’t help it. “She’ll destroy this city first.”
Ivor moves forward like a rolling boulder, closing the little distance between us in an instant. He presses his palm to my collar, not grabbing, simply imposing his presence onto me. “Hear me this, laddie,” he whispers. “Something in Maraheem needs to change. If Lilias Erskine is the only one who’s brave enough to do it with me, then so be it.” Within his unyielding stare is the compassion of his soup kitchen and the man who let a stranger sleep in his back room. “I know what she’s done to you—I ken it hasn’t been fair. But life hasn’t been real fair to her long before you came around, and she might make things fairer for a lot of wee bairns who’ve only ever experienced the shite end of existence.”
I want to blame him for the pain she’s caused me, but the rush of anger my parasite lurches through me makes my focus rise above my own suffering, grabbing onto all the things I shouldn’t be caring about. “She’s bad news.” My stomach ties itself into a knot, binding the statement in an acidic certainty. I press my own hand to Ivor’s, letting my nails dig. “That ignit she has was the finfolk’s. She let the BA overrun them for it. How fair is that totheirchildren.”
“I heard.” Ivor’s wrinkles multiply. His grip on me slips. “But what’s done is done. It’ll save lives here. If we want control of the city long enough to establish anything new, we’ve gotta capture the heads of the big seven and take what they’ve kept from us. We’re gonna hypnotize the upper city with the ignit and bind them before they recover. Less fighting, less death. But I’m not gonna claim I’ve done all good here. No matter how hard we try, more people’ll still die from this.”
Lilias’s voice rises again as she shouts a word that sounds an awful lot likekilling.
Alasdair, Ailsa, Sheona, Malloch—every side has suffered, even the ones who never realized the lines were being drawn. My eyes lift to the smaller version of Ivor’s sign, nailed above the bar: a slightly darker red, deepened by age, but still the same aggressive color as the symbol painted beside the Findlay’s bodies.
“It was you.” I can feel his presence in my past, haunting me each step I took, just as thoroughly as I know that the knowledge itself changes nothing. I still stand here, now, bearing the weight of every consequence. “You were Lilias’s partner on the phone. You had Malloch murder Tavish’s siblings and came up with the plot to frame him. You let Lilias hold me hostage, and when you realized who was walking out of your bar, you sent her after me again.” No bitterness mars my words, just a sad emptiness. It turns out that the inside of my rage is hollow.
“Aye.” Ivor’s brow casts dark shadows over his eyes. His hand flattens against my collar. When he speaks, it’s with all the emotion I lack, tight and desolate, stubborn and hopeful, fierce and solid. “I have to keep believing that this’ll all be worth it.”
“And if it isn’t?” I whisper.
Ivor looks across the street, his gaze shifting from one exhausted, anxious face to the next. “It will be. It’ll be worth everything it’s cost.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Instead, I drag my hand down the front of my face and grit my teeth, trying to sort through my hatred for Lilias and Ivor’s hazy morality and my own empathy for the lower city’s plight. The pieces of each can’t quite fit together in my mind. Maybe they aren’t meant to. Maybe some situations aren’t right or wrong, but a mess of everything in between.
A mess that doesn’t involve me. But I’m already here, already so close to the Trench. My parasite shifts through my consciousness, and I know what it wants to say as though our communication barrier has cracked right down the middle:We’realready here. We could do so much, together.
But the Trench awaits us, the Trench that will bring me closer to my freedom and my parasite’s original goals. Their mess is not my mess. It’s not our mess. I have to repeat the reminder until my parasite relents.
